Thread by @jhaskinscabrera

My article on the ruling yesterday by the Florida 1st DCA that Alachua County's mask mandate is "presumptively unconstitutional" - kudos to attorney Jeff Childers @jchilders98 for the big win!

1/9

https://twitter.com/AlachuaChronic1/status/1403820453001629696

Governmental mask mandates in the 32 counties in the First District of Florida must now be presumed to be unconstitutional after yesterday’s ruling by the First District Court of Appeals (1st DCA) on a lawsuit brought by business owner Justin Green against Alachua County.

2/9

Judge Tanenbaum began by describing the mask mandate in Alachua County, using terms like “fiats,” “diktats,” and “whispering informants”... Tanenbaum even included a picture of Alachua County’s mandated sign in the order.

3/9

Childers decided from the beginning that he would base the lawsuit on Florida’s strong right to privacy, and Tanenbaum wrote that when a temporary injunction motion is based on a privacy challenge, any law that implicates privacy “is presumptively unconstitutional”

4/9

The right of privacy in the Florida Constitution’s Declaration of Rights states in part: “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein.”

5/9

Tanenbaum writes that the Florida Constitution’s guarantee of bodily and personal inviolability includes “the inviolability of something so intimate as one’s own face. A person then reasonably can expect to be free from governmental coercion regarding what he puts on it.”

6/9

“City of Gainesville can’t make its employees wear masks if they aren’t vaxed... can’t make citizens wear masks to get into City Hall. Nor can Shands, or UF, or K-12 public schools, and so on. If they persist, they will be in defiance of the law.”
jeff-childers.medium.com/how-i-beat-the…

7/9

As Childers writes, “This is the very first appellate decision in the entire country finding that masking is unconstitutional... Maybe this decision, even if it’s subsequently reversed, will be an encouragement to other courts and other judges.”

8/9

Childers has been writing for some time about “cracks in the dam” of COVID-19 restrictions, and he now says, “Maybe this is where the foundations of the dam are finally swept away.”

9/9